YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – America’s 250th birthday could be viewed as a collective achievement that would not have been possible without the stories of individuals – the exceptional, the flawed and those in between.
Remembering individuals, including adventurers who ended up in the Mahoning Valley, is how historical societies in Columbiana and Trumbull counties are celebrating the semiquincentennial anniversary.
“We have a lot of people who really struggle with connecting the local history to the national level,” says Kate Pfouts, archivist of the Trumbull County Historical Society. “And you can’t have a national history without going to the local level. The history of the everyday person is very important,”
Savannah Moss, historical society collections and research manager, agrees.
“You say history is written by the victors, but it’s just written,” she adds. “You’ve just got to write it.”
Encouraging everyday people to write down their memories of growing up in Trumbull County is one of the ways the historical society is commemorating this year. It’s called Trumbull Living Memories: Our Community’s Time Capsule. The historical society is asking people to share their stories of life here.
For those who prefer speaking over writing, there will be events where oral histories also will be recorded. The memories and photographs people share will be preserved.
Students can explore Trumbull County this summer and fall, visiting 34 historical sites across its 25 townships. This is Trumbull: A Local History Adventure, in partnership with the Trumbull Tourism Bureau, is a sort of history scavenger hunt. Participants collect clues at each site and individuals who gather all of the clues by year’s end will be entered into a raffle.
And when school is back in session, classrooms will be invited to envision the future, creating art or written predictions of what the future will look like in the next 250 years. These will be added to a time capsule and will be buried at the Morgan History Center, which is undergoing renovation.
TRUMBULL’S STORY
At the time of the country’s founding, native Americans comprised most of the county’s residents with a few settlers making it their home.
Trails like the Salt Springs Trail, as well as rivers, crossed through the Mahoning Valley. People traveled these trails between Fort Pitt in what is now Pittsburgh, Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas River near Bolivar, Ohio, and Lake Erie.
Fort Laurens was built as the American colonists sought to go west and eventually attack the British Fort Detroit, as well as provide protection for settlers and Christian Delaware Native Americans in that area.
“Fort Laurens ultimately failed due to a lack of supplies and a very harsh winter,” Pfouts says. “There were a couple of sieges on the fort and it was eventually abandoned less than a year after it was built, so we have a lot of troops pulling back to Fort McIntosh [in Beaver, Pa.] and then focusing more on the war on the eastern seafront.”
Still, people were travelling through and settling in the area during the Revolutionary War time period, according to Pfouts.
“We have a lot of settlement around [Niles and Mineral Ridge] and a lot of trading happening there, but during the time of the Revolution, Ohio is really just a middle zone, an open battleground,” Pfouts says.
The Connecticut Land Co. owned all of Trumbull County and much of northern Ohio.
Land was purchased by settlers or promised to Revolutionary War veterans after their service.
Warren was founded in 1798, before Ohio became a state in 1803. The Pioneer Cemetery was started in 1804 and records indicate there are 19 Revolutionary War veterans buried there, according to Pfouts, including John H. Adgate, whose wife was the first burial. Those veterans are among about 200 Revolutionary War veterans buried in Trumbull County, according to Moss and Pfouts.
EAST LIVERPOOL MONUMENT
Steve Barlow has found 152 known Revolutionary War patriots buried in Columbiana County.
On July 11, a 10-foot high monument listing them all will be unveiled at the corner of Sixth and Washington streets in East Liverpool. The monument by Richardson Monuments is being funded through donations, including from the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, the Elks Lodge #258 and the American Legion Post 374, as well as paver bricks purchased.
Barlow, who is an SAR member, says this part of history was meaningful to him even before he learned of his ancestral connection.
“We didn’t necessarily have a chance of winning,” Barlow says. “It was a fight against all the odds. We didn’t have any cannons here. We were declaring war and separating from the strongest nation on earth, the biggest navy, the biggest army. We don’t have any navy, only their hunting rifles, don’t have any money … The odds were really against them and it was a miracle they pulled it off.”
And Barlow admires the hardships they endured including marching through winter, many of them without shoes. Many died of disease and fought starvation to battle for a country that did not exist. Yet they held on.
“It was a heroic time for our country and what they did – they changed the world,” Barlow says.
East Liverpool’s East End is also the location of Point of Beginning, the demarcation at the western boundary of Pennsylvania and the northern bank of the Ohio River where surveyors led by Thomas Hutchins in 1785 started mapping out the Northwest Territory.
Barlow points out each township section had an area set aside for a church and a school, showing how important religion and education were to those who settled the territory. He also noted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 included no slavery in the newly established state.
Carolyn Stepien, a researcher at the Columbiana County Archives and Research Center in Lisbon helped Barlow research some local Revolutionary War patriots when he was determining who to place on the monument using pension records.
She found many veterans came from Lancaster County or Washington County in Pennsylvania or Loudoun County in Virginia.
As they aged, they applied for pensions from their service, but had to prove need to get it. Documents she found showed them declaring meager belongings such as a pot, a horse, as well as an ailment or an ill child. Stepien says the pension of one man, William Phillips, who lived in Franklin Township, was rejected because he lacked proof of at least six months’ service. Others, including Stepien’s fourth great grandfather, Daniel Herbert, owned too much to qualify.
Another veteran highlighted in an upcoming archives newsletter was Stout Chamberlain, who lived in Washington County, Pa., and traveled through the area as he was both at Fort Laurens and Fort McIntosh. Before his death, he moved into Columbiana County, Stepien explains.
Her research also uncovered George James, who served in the later part of the war and never married after a Revolutionary War leader found him an unsuitable match for his sister. James moved to Columbiana County and earned a salt boring patent and is believed to have bored the first salt well near Salineville in 1809, although he struck more gas than salt on his first attempt. The location of his grave is unknown.
BOATMAN CEMETERY
Buried in East Palestine in what was later named Pioneer Boatman Memorial Cemetery in his honor, Barnerd Boatman also was a Revolutionary War veteran. Historic records sometimes list his first name as either Barnard or Barnhardt.
Research shows Boatman was a servant and served on Gen. George Washington’s kitchen staff while encamped, according to Marina Davis, a retired archeologist who lives in a house overlooking Boatman Cemetery. After a month of being a kitchen aid, Davis said Boatman was engaged by Col. Richard Parker of the first brigade in the Virginia line. During his service, Boatman procured items for officers, Davis says.
Eventually he served under Capt. John Outwater for two years at first as a substitute soldier before his own enlistment.
Boatman settled in Bucks County, Pa., home to many German speaking immigrants. He married Catherine Overbeck in 1785 and they had 13 children in 32 years, some of whom are buried with him and Catherine at the Boatman Cemetery. He lived to be 93 years old.
“I was really surprised by a lot of different denominations all buried there,” says Davis, who notes at one point the cemetery was tied to the Calvanistic meeting house, the Presbyterians and then the Reformed Presbyterians.
The Boatman Cemetery is purported to be the final resting place of Boatman as well as revolutionaries Silas Leonard and Samuel Meek and veterans of other wars.
COLUMBIANA CELEBRATES
Two of the Revolutionary War veterans being celebrated in Columbiana and Fairfield Township are Jacob Seachrist and Joshua Dixon.
Dixon, the founder of the city of Columbiana, was buried in East Fairfield.
“Unfortunately, the Quakers at the time just used a rock to know where it was at,” says Deborah Firestone-Himes, president of the Historical Society of Columbiana and Fairfield Township, who adds she would like to see a Revolutionary War marker placed in the area of his grave.
Private Seachrist served with the Lancaster County Militia, 9th Battalion, working at a holding center for British and Hessian soldiers during the war. Seacrist’s battalion was also engaged in frontier patrols in Northumberland and Northampton to defend against the Native Americans. He is the only known Revolutionary War veteran buried in Columbiana city, but 14 revolutionaries are believed buried in the surrounding area with some in unknown graves.
Firestone-Himes says the historical society began preparing several years ago in anticipation of the America 250.
Part of that preparation was ensuring local stories are not lost. A 2022 grant funded digitization of early newspapers of Columbiana and early Fairfield Township records, Firestone-Himes says.
Through a partnership with the Columbiana Public Library and Advantage Archives, those documents are available free of charge online.
A 2023 grant from the Columbiana Community Foundation, funded digitizing the yearbooks of Columbiana, East Fairfield and Crestview schools. Those are now available on the historical society’s website.
In 2024 and 2025, the society began digitizing hundreds of early photos from Columbiana and the surrounding area, including 100 from the collection of the Koch family of New Waterford. The photographs are searchable and online.
Additionally, the log house museum, gifted and opened as a museum during the Bicentennial in 1976, has been repaired to be maintained in future years.
Finally, the historical society, with the help of general contractor Jim Santini Builder Inc., has been restoring the 1890 Stick Chapel. An example of stick architecture, the structure was built at the request of Brig. Gen. Ephraim Samuel Holloway, a Civil War veteran from Columbiana. Once restored, the chapel will be available for services.
“For 250, our goal was to get the history out there and make it accessible to anybody,” says Firestone-Himes.
Pictured at top: Kate Pfouts and Savannah Moss stand in front of the John Stark Edwards House, the oldest house remaining in Warren. The house was built in 1807 by the son of Pierpont Edwards, a Revolutionary War veteran and an original purchaser of shares in the Connecticut Land Co.
